Mary Shields Legendary Musher

When next in Fairbanks you should choose to spend a few hours with Mary Shields.

Mary was the first woman to finish the Iditarod, she also participated in the “Hope 1991” 1200 Km mush through Siberia (Google required for some of you).

Mary is seventy years old in two weeks and still mushing. Mary claims “she gets by with a little help from her friends”, I suspect Mary would get by no matter what.

One of Mary’s books

Mary lives just out of Fairbanks, it’s changed a lot since Mary hit town 49 years ago from Wisconsin as a naïve (her description) first generation greenie.

A walk around the “downtown” area of Fairbanks reveals the typical decay of the business district as a result of the introduction of the shopping mall lifestyle demanded by the military in the USA (over twenty per cent of the population of Fairbanks is military and these are the guys with the disposable income). Freeways are replacing byways and the world, as us older folk knew it, has changed forever. Good or bad time will tell.